What Makes Barbie so Timeless?
Barbie is more than a doll, she is an identity all to herself. For decades she is bound up in the lives of young girls, while many young women aspire to be like her—a doll. She has been an object of antagonism and adoration, but she won’t go away. However you stretch it, Barbie is ubiquitous. What's the origin story, and what makes her such a powerful and lasting cultural symbol?
1959 Barbie. Today's Barbie might be changing, but here's a 1959 doll, Courtesy @amhistorymuseum — http://s.si.edu/1JIs9pq & http://bit.ly/34zCd1Y
Barbie: the Origin Story
The 1950s was not so much the birth as the sedimentation of an ideal body type that drew from an artificial source. Barbie was launched in 1959 first intended by the company Mattel to be a fashion doll before it became de rigueur for every self-respecting, upwardly mobile middle-class girl in the developed world.
Time.com, Bild Lilli doll, German, 1955 Science & Society Picture Library / Getty Images — https://bit.ly/2LPEsrr
Her inventor, Ruth Handler, drew direct inspiration from the Bild Lilli doll that arrived on the market in 1955, based on a German cartoon character by Reinhard Beuthien for Bild-Zeitung (‘Image Newspaper’) in Hamburg.
Unlike Chanel’s epicene bodies (Chanel notoriously had her models like her: boyish and petite), Lilli's body, with her long legs, high heels, and perky, protuberant breasts, reflected the newly confident woman of the postwar era and is an early historical marker in female sexual expression, with many risqué clothing accessories, including a sheer bikini.
But in anticipation of Barbie, her embodiment of femininity had a divided audience. M. G. Lord in Forever Barbie witheringly describes the Lilli doll as ‘a lascivious plaything for adult men…marketed as a sort of three-dimensional pinup’.[i]
It is a valid statement when considering how the modern love/sex doll was soon to become emotionally integrated into the lives of desperate men. Lilli's production ceased in 1964 when Mattel purchased the company to draw all the focus to their own product, Barbie.
Barbie's appearance was to great fanfare at the American International Toy Fair. The date, 9 March 1959, is celebrated by venerating fans as her official birthday. This makes her, at the time of writing this book, well past the stages of menopause.
To quote some of Mary Rogers’ opening words in Barbie Culture, ‘Barbie has a great deal to show us about how we are, who we want to be, and who we fear we might be or might become’.[ii]
Barbie as Fantastic Icon
As opposed to cultural icons, which are, or were, existing people (Michael Jackson, Elvis, Presley, Marilyn Monroe), Barbie is a fictive and fantastic icon in the same grouping as superheroes who help to galvanize or thirst for enchantment, nostalgia, and escape, and that can ‘burst cognitive and emotional limits on consciousness’.[iii]
Barbie evolved from her German cousin Lilli who was an object of male delectation, a ‘comical gift’,[iv] to become a paragon of cultural styling and female identity. At the end of the twentieth century, Handler, her ‘mother’, is reported to have stated that ‘Barbie is an institution, and has been copyrighted as a work of art’.[v]
In Barbie, we find encoded a series of highly pronounced and recognizable traits of femininity anchored in a signature prettiness and daintiness. If she is dressed as something more butch, such as a cowgirl (1981), her suit is in white satin and has silver trimmings,[vi] and any other ensembles with trousers are off-set with one or more visual cues associated with decorative and delightful womanliness, whose underpinnings are in leisure and luxury.
What does Barbie ‘do’?
Barbie does not work, and if she is in working apparel, it is more for the sake of the clothing and the look than the activity. She is thus what working women could become should they become rich or marry 'well', although Barbie 'herself' has never married; her counterpart Ken, who came about in 1961, is her occasional companion.
But it is this unresolved state that Barbie inhabits that has led to speculations that she is more of an adolescent than a woman, a doll-dream of 'every' adolescent girl who wants to be and do all things.
Marketed to girls pre-adolescent and adolescent alike, a child idol, Barbie occupies what Catherine Driscoll calls a ‘tween space’.[vii]
Fashion Doll
As such, Barbie, who paradoxically touches on every facet of life, with every guise imaginable, is always in some kind of vacuum. She is the quintessential cipher which is still necessary for a fashion model, who ultimately must serve the clothing, the scenario, the image, the theatre of fashionability.
Barbie would therefore never quit her original ‘role’ as fashion doll: Oscar de la Renta designed a line for her in 1984. A year later, a Barbie with a distinctly anime face was released wearing clothing designed by Kansai Yamomoto. In 1994, a year after Barbie sales had climbed to close to a billion dollars,[viii]
Bloomingdales commissioned from Nicole Miller a Barbie, which they called the 'Savvy Shopper'. At the same time, in 1999, Paris staged two exhibitions to celebrate her fortieth birthday, which was later featured in Monaco, including the Barbies owned by Princesses Caroline and Stephanie.[ix] Since this period, a prestige line of Barbies wearing high-end clothing, such as by Dior, Givenchy or Escada.[x]
Givenchy Barbie. A timeless beauty, a timeless fashion. In one of the most exciting "firsts" ever, Barbie® doll wears a classic reproduction of a 1956 gown by world-famous fashion designer Givenchy — http://bit.ly/3mBll16
Barbie's manifold and close attachment to the fashion industry also serve to exemplify another point, which has to do with the complementarity if not the inextricability between body and dress.
For it is also haute couture’s taste for outrageousness at its most experimental and indulgent that also necessitates equally outrageous body types.
As Rogers declares, ‘Barbie’s style might be called emphatic femininity. It takes feminine appearances and demeanour to unsustainable extremes’. The use of the word ‘unsustainable’ has many trajectories, particularly how some commentators have inverted the rather consistent querulousness and outrage over her feminine stereotyping.
Erica Rand, for example, argues that these traits and trappings are so unsustainable, so emphatic, that they stretch the limits of plausibility such that she retreats from being a fully-blown woman to enter the terrain of the drag queen.
This observation takes its cue from Judith Butler’s influential idea of gender performativity. While all gender is performed, its status as performed is confirmed in dragging, when attributes and emphasized and writ large. As Butler states,
As much as drag creates a unified picture of ‘woman’ (what its critics often oppose), it also reveals the distinctness of those aspects of gendered experience that are falsely naturalized as a unity through the regulatory fiction of heterosexual coherence. In imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself—as well as its contingency.[xi]
In Barbie, Rand sees a regular playing out of this configuration through the reinstatement, overstatement, and parody found in male drag queens.
And Ken? Lover or Gay Buddy?
Meanwhile, Ken is inscribed with a gay identity. In interviews with gay and lesbian adults, Rand also shows how Barbie was significant to their own identity building.[xii]
The first Barbie, introduced in 1959. Ken arrived in 1961. Mel Melcon — http://bit.ly/2Jbz9BF
One factor in all of this is that gay and lesbian identity is not buttressed by the rational fiction of heteronormativity, that it is rational and right. Queer identity is constructed and artificial,[xiii] so it would follow that Barbie, also heavily constructed and artificial avant la lettre, would play a starring role.
Rand recounts how Barbie has participated in the identity of femme lesbians, who are not necessarily complicit in imposed norms but rather are conscious of its construction.[xiv] She discusses how Barbie was treated or refitted by girls who became lesbians, such as being 'rolled in dirt or dressed like the hot babysitter next door'.[xv]
It is precisely Barbie’s pronounced femininity that makes her so liable for subversion and desecration, a perfect sexual object ready to be spoiled and messed-up.[xvi]
Her perfection makes her prone to be the site of children's and adult's frustrations and left-of-field desires.
In considering Barbie's longevity and pervasiveness, it is also worth reflecting on how she retains her dual status as both toy and fashion doll.
A visual survey of her passage through time is also to chart the evolution of fashion from the 1960s to the present. The Barbie industry employs hundreds of people to ensure that she is continually reinvented.[xvii]
In her maximal and extraordinary mutability, Barbie is also the ultimate cipher of identity: she is at once astronaut and nurse, and plays any sport, does anything.[xviii]
A marriage of artifice and eternal mutability, she is the embodiment of fashion itself, palpable in her plasticity, but elusively outside and unreal. She is as restless as her male counterpart, the bodybuilder.
References:
[i] M. G. Lord, Forever Barbie, New York: William Morrow and Co., 1994, 7-8.
[ii] Mary Rogers, Barbie Culture, London: Sage, 1999, 1.
[iii] Ibid., 3.
[iv] David Groves, ‘A Doll’s Life’, Los Angeles Times, 15 December, 1994, cit. Kristin Weissman, Barbie: the Icon, the Image, the Ideal, Universal Publishers, 1999, 11.
[v] Weissman, ibid., 12.
[vi] Laura Jacobs, BarbieTM: What a Doll!, New York and London: Artabras of Abbeville, 1994, 42.
[vii] Catherine Driscoll, ‘Girl-Doll: Barbie as Puberty Manual’, Counterpoints, 245: Seven Going on Seventeen: Tween Studies in the Culture of Girlhood, 2005, 224-241.
[viii] Erica Rand, Barbie’s Queer Accessories, Durham: Duke U.P., 1995, 9.
[ix] Peers, The Fashion Doll, 174-175.
[x] Ibid., 176.
[xi] Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, London and New York: Routledge, 1990,137, emphasis in the original.
[xii] Rand, Barbie’s Queer Accessories, chapter two, ‘Younger Heads on Older Bodies’, 93-148.
[xiii] For a detailed discussion of queer identity and artificiality, see Adam Geczy and Vicki Karaminas, Queer Style, London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2013, ‘Introduction’ and passim.
[xiv] Rand, Barbie’s Queer Accessories, 109-111.
[xv] Ibid., 115.
[xvi] Ibid., 150.
[xvii] Rogers, Barbie Culture, 90ff.
[xviii] ‘Interview with Nancie Martin (Mattel)’, in Justine Cassell and Henry Jenkins eds., From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games, Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2000, 145-146
